CrowdFlower announces a scientific advisory board as it works to combine AI and crowdsourcing

When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human judgment from crowdsourced labor pools. Now CrowdFlower bringing on more experts to shape the development of that technology. Specifically it's formed a three-person scientific advisory board, made up of Barney Pell (founder/co-founder of startups including Powerset, LocoMobi and Moon Express, who also led an artificial intelligence team at NASA), Anthony Goldbloom (founder and CEO of Kaggle) and Pete Warden (a staff research engineer at Google, where he's the technical lead on the TensorFlow Mobile machine learning project). "With all these different customers and all these different applications, we wanted them to be confident that they're going to get a high-quality algorithm," said Biewald. He's also a friend of mine from college --although we really only talk about CrowdFlower now, which is kinda sad when you think about it.) "One way to make sure all the product decisions we make really reflect the cutting edge was to get some of the world leaders come in and look at our product."